If you thought Gateway was only half serious about morphing from a computer company into a consumer electronics provider, take a look at the Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder. Like the company's successful plasma TV offering before it, the AR-230 is all about the family room, with nary a PC cable in sight.

Aside from the brand name on the metallic champagne faceplate, what makes this unit notable is the price: $349 direct (not counting the $50 mail-in rebate), which makes the AR-230 just about the lowest-priced progressive-scan player plus recorder you'll find right now. Best of all, the AR-230 was simple to set up and straightforward to use.

The bundle has everything you need to get started, including a remote control, coax cable, gold-plated component video cables, and one piece of DVD+RW media. The AR-230 can write to DVD+R and +RW blanks, and it can read these as well as DVD-Video titles (of course), DVD-R and RW media, Video CDs, audio CDs, and CD-R and RW discs. Unlike other DVD players, it doesn't support DVD-Audio discs or Photo CDs.

If you've ever hooked up a VCR, you'll have no trouble connecting the AR-230 to your TV and home theater system. The clear, comprehensive user guide is well-thought-out and covers all the bases, including a helpful good/better/best explanation of the three video-input choices (composite, s-video, component) the unit accepts. We did notice one oversightand a doozy at thatwhich prompted a call to tech support: If you want to create DVD+R discs that can be read in other set-top DVD players, you have to finalize the disc. It's an easy operation (accessible via the remote control's Disc Tools button), but a step most users won't know about.

Once we got that figured out, the AR-230 performed flawlessly. The recorder's front-mounted analog and FireWire video inputs make transferring video from your camcorder especially easy. We hooked up a five-year-old Sharp ViewCam and transferred a stack of analog 8-mm tapes to Verbatim DVD+R media.

Unlike most PC-based products (such as the HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000), which require analog video to be captured and encoded, then burned, the AR-230 performs both operations on the fly. That means transferring footage requires no longer than the time it takes for your camcorder to feed it into the recorder. A handy bar at the top of the screen (which doesn't show up on you final recording) shows the transfer time elapsed as well as the total amount of video the disc can hold (based on the quality setting you picked), so you can monitor the process while doing other things.

But there is a trade-off for the time savings. When capturing video, the recorder sets random chapter points every 5 minutes by default (you can change this value in the Settings menu). So to find a certain scene on a home-made disc, you'll need to skip through it in incrementally. On a PC with DVD-authoring software, of course, you have the ability to set chapter points at scene changes, where they make sense. We've also seen other set-top recorders that let you click a button on the remote during transfer to set chapter points manually; the AR-230 doesn't have that feature.

Naturally, you can also use the AR-230 as you would a traditional VCR to record television programming. Hitting the Timer button on the remote brings up an easy-to-navigate menu on the bottom half of your TV screen where you enter frequency, start and end times, and so on. That bottom menu also shows the five recording instances you currently have programmed, which makes programming the AR-230 much more TiVo-like than most VCRs. The top portion of the TimerRecord screen has a video window that shows what's playing on the channel you've selected to recorda nice touch when you can't remember if HGTV is channel 30 or 31.

You can fit up to 6 hours of recorded video on a disc, but that setting is best left to a week's worth of soaps where the video qualityakin to SLP on a VHS tapedoesn't matter much. You can also choose to fit 4 or 2 hours on a disc. For our home movies, we chose the HQ setting. That setting fit only 1 hour of video on each disc, but the quality was as good as the source material.

The Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder is a fine value. If you have a library of fading analog tapes but don't have the time or inclination to tackle transferring them to DVD via a PC, this is the way to go. And if it's time for a new VCR, the low price of the AR-230 should convince you to switch to DVD.

Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder

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About the Author

Jamie M. Bsales is the senior editor overseeing the First Looks section at PC Magazine. He assigns and edits hands-on reviews of new software and hardware products, and oversees the magazine's Coming Attractions new product announcement page.

Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder

Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder

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